Quotes from Donald Whitney

And to the degree we truly comprehend more of God, we will in turn respond to Him more in worship. That's why all worship of God—public, family,[1] and private worship—should be based upon and include much of the Bible.

Without absorption of the water of God's Word, there's no quenching our spiritual thirst. Meditation is the means of absorption.

Pray over the Scriptures. Christians just setting out on the path of prayer sometimes pray for everything they can think of, glance at their watches, and discover they have been at it for all of three or four minutes. This experience sometimes generates feelings of defeat, discouragement, even despair. A great way to begin to overcome this problem is to pray through various biblical passages.

Discipline without direction is drudgery.

In most Christian circles you will rarely hear fasting mentioned, and few will have read anything about it. And yet it's mentioned in Scripture more times even than something as important as baptism (about seventy-seven times for fasting to seventy-five for baptism).

To read the Bible and not to meditate was seen as an unfruitful exercise: better to read one chapter and meditate afterward than to read several chapters and not to meditate.

According to James 1:22-25, we can experience God's truth so powerfully that what the Lord wants us to do becomes as plain to us as our face in the morning mirror. But if we do not apply the truth as we meet it, regardless of how wonderful the experience of discovering the truth has been, we deceive ourselves if we think we will be blessed for giving attention to the Bible on those occasions. The one who "will be blessed in his doing" is the one who does what Scripture says.

But the main reason why the psalms work so well in prayer is that the very purpose God put them in his Word to us is for us to put them in our words to him.

Sixth, the Spiritual Disciplines are means, not ends. The end—that is, the purpose of practicing the Disciplines—is godliness.

When you speak the gospel, you share "the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." Sharing the gospel is like walking around in a thunderstorm and handing out lightning rods. You don't know when the lightning will strike or who it will strike, but you know what it will strike—the lightning rod of the gospel. And when it does, that person's lightning rod will be charged with the power of God and he or she will believe.

Elisabeth Elliot is more precise when she explains that "freedom and discipline have come to be regarded as mutually exclusive, when in fact freedom is not at all the opposite, but the final reward, of discipline.

Without a clear biblical purpose, fasting becomes an end in itself.